Film-makers live life of adventure

Press, 11 February 1983, Page 1

Film-makers live life of adventure

Name any far-flung corner of the world and the chances are that Henri and Caroline Materna have filmed it. That includes crossing Antarctica in a dog-sledge, roaming the Sahara Desert with a Bedouin family, and living with head-hunters in New Guinea. Henri Materna, aged 45, and his wife Caroline, aged 38, are Austrian film-makers who have spent their 18 years of marriage making television documentaries of family life in different countries and cultures. New Zealand is one of their more civilised subjects. “We always like to get to the ends of the world and in a way New Zealand is that, although it is a very civilised and sophisticated end of the world,” said Mr Materna. “We are not looking for head-hunters this time and I am told there are very few Eskimos.” Deer farming has brought the couple on their fourth visit to New Zealand. They have also made films about the countryside, a sheep farm, and New Zealand’s work in Antarctica. This time they are spending the three weeks at Haldon station in the Mackenzie

Country for a documentary about the life Mr James Innes and his family lead on their deer farm. The growing popularity of group travel and wilderness tours is making it harder to find new and remote peoples. “It is getting more difficult to get there ahead of them every year,” Mr Materna said.. “Where you had trouble going 15 years ago they move in there with light planes and jet boats.” After living and filming as the only Europeans among 400,000 Africans in their South African homeland, Mr Materna returned last June to show them the end product. In the two-year interval the Ndebele had moved towards independence and the tribesmen he had known were Cabinet Ministers wearing three-piece suits. If he had not packed a tie, Mr Materna thinks he would have been the worst-dressed person at the showing. They have survived other more serious situations. The closest shave was in New Guinea when they gave penicillin. to the seriously ill brother of a local chief and then sent him to a mission hospital the next day.

The Maternas were later told that the man had had little chance of surviving even with the penicillin and if he had not recovered his family would have avenged his death. Fortunately he lived. There have been other near misses. Their travels nearly landed them in the Falkland Islands just before the Argentinian invasion and in Afghanistan when the Russians started moving in.

Mr Materna travels most of the year but Mrs Materna now spends more time editing and writing scripts at home in Austria with their two sons, Patrick, aged 11, and Michael, aged 16.

“We never knew where they would finish up living, so we gave them names that would go anywhere," she said. For three months each year the family goes on holiday together, to the United States.

The next stop is the Australian outback and then possibly a small equatorial island.

The Maternas are looking for another type of family life to film before they leave New Zealand at the end of March — but they say, “Please, no more sheep.”